Background on Msgpack

Msgpack is an efficient (in space and time) serialization protocol that behaves similarly to JSON. It should provide faster and more robust serialization for agent/master communications, without requiring many changes in our code.

When msgpack is enabled, the Puppet master and agent will communicate using msgpack instead of PSON.

Enabling Msgpack Serialization

Enabling msgpack is easy, but first it must be installed, as we don’t include this gem in the puppet-agent or puppetserver packages.

Once this is configured, the Puppet master server(s) will use msgpack when serving any agents that have preferred_serialization_format set to msgpack. Any agents without that setting will continue to receive PSON as normal.